09/02/2012

Very impressive showing by the Big 12 in its opening weekend of amateur football. While Alabama was beating the crud out of Michigan, Oklahoma State was taking care of business against Savannah State.

The Big 12 went 9-0 on Saturday and proved not only can it win a Conference USA title if necessary, but would also qualify for the Football Championship Series playoffs.

* No. 4 Oklahoma was the only dumb one to actually go on the road and it looked very ish in a 24-7 win at UTEP. The Miners were 5-7 last season so considering who else the Big 12 played this weekend this qualifies as a "tough" out.

* No. 11 West Virginia fit right in with the Big 12 by defeating Marshall, 69-34.

* No. 19 Oklahoma State defeated a very, very underrated Savannah State team, 84-0. What is Savannah State? Got me. It finished 1-10 last season in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference. Hope they enjoy T-Boone's check.

* No. 15 Texas showed all of its new uVerse Longhorn Network viewers it can win the MWC by defeating Wyoming, 37-17. The Cowboys were 8-5 last season, so it least Mack Brown didn't Mike Gundy it up.

* No. 22 Kansas State showed there is no better non-conference scheduler than Bill Snyder with 51-9 win against Missouri State of the mighty Missouri Valley Conference.

08/31/2012

FORT WORTH - What should be a fun non-conference game for college football fans in 2013 is already something TCU head coach Gary Patterson is not looking forward to.

A few years ago he agreed to a home-and-home series against LSU. The first game is scheduled for Sept. 7, 2013 at LSU. The return game is Sept. 6 in Fort Worth in 2014.

The design was for LSU to be the one non-conference game on TCU's schedule that would give his team some idea how good they are. Games such as these, which Boise State has done for years, are vitally important if you are not in a BCS conference.

Now that TCU is in a BCS conference, the LSU game looks like a death wish.

"It's probably not a great game. You lose seven or eight players in that game going into conference ...," Patterson said. "You have to be smart. ... Back in 2001, we played Nebraska in the Kickoff Classic. We lost four starters for the season. ... When we scheduled the LSU game that was because we were in the Mountain West and we needed a game like that to find out where we are as a program. I don't need to find that out now."

08/18/2012

It is agreed that the college football preseason polls are a giant waste of time because they are just so wrong, but they are nonetheless a lot of fun.

This morning the AP has released its 2012 college football preseason poll, and Lane Kiffin's semi-pro USC Trojans are apparently the best team in the country. It helps the Trojans play in a Pac-12 that features a total of three ranked teams.

Five of the top 10 are from the SEC. Six of the top 25 come from the Big 12, including TCU at 20.

08/01/2012

First thing: Asked incoming Texas A&M director of athletics Eric Hyman about the Aggies scheduling Texas in football. His answer was ... "I'm for whatever is best for Texas A&M."

That's a yes, but really a no comment.

Moving on.

Hyman remembers that day at Ridglea Country Club in Fort Worth when he announced to a large group of TCU supporters that their school had been asked to join Conference USA.

The reaction was - who?

"It was a Frog Club meeting and I was just so ecstatic that we had been asked to join Conference USA," Hyman told me today in an interview we had about his new job at Texas A&M; Hyman will be taking over as director of athletics at Texas A&M officially in a couple of weeks.

He was at TCU from 1998 to '05, and helped coordinate TCU's move from The WAC to CUSA in 2001.

"You could tell no one there thought very much of it. They didn't know what it meant," he said. "I remember telling them that this was such a good thing because this meant we were wanted. And if people wanted you that meant you were good. No one is going to want you if you aren't any good."

Hyman left Fort Worth in 2005 for South Carolina, but so much of the success TCU has enjoyed in recent seasons deserves to be on his resume. He was one of the original re-builders.

But not even he could see what was coming for TCU.

"To be frank, no," Hyman said. "It truly is one of the best stories in college football: 1-10 in 1997 and 12 years later they win the Rose Bowl. I remember I was watching that Rose Bowl game with my wife and we were literally in tears. People don't understand how difficult that was. My thing was, 'The only way for us to have options was for us to be good.'

"People at TCU wanted to be in the Big 12. Now, realistically do you think that is actually going to happen? I don't think so. But you have to keep grinding, and if you are good things are going to happen."